OpenAI and Microsoft face an increasing number of lawsuits from non-fiction authors.
OpenAI and Microsoft are facing another lawsuit from non-fiction authors who allege that their intellectual property was used without permission to train OpenAI’s generative AI technology. Following a previous lawsuit in November, journalists Nicholas A. Basbanes and Nicholas Gage have now filed a proposed class action lawsuit, accusing the companies of engaging in a deliberate and extensive theft of copyrighted works belonging to writers like themselves.
Professional writers “have limited capital to fund their research” and “typically self-fund their projects,” they said in their complaint. Meanwhile, the defendants have “ready access to billions in capital” and “simply stole” the plaintiffs’ “copyrighted works to build another billion-plus dollar commercial industry,” they allege. Using copyrighted works is a “deliberate strategy” by the companies, the complaint says, and not paying authors gives the defendants “an even higher profit margin.” The plaintiffs added that the companies could have explored alternative financing options, such as profit sharing, but instead “chose to steal.”
Basbanes and Gage seek to “represent a class of authors whose copyrighted work has been systematically plundered” by the defendants. They are seeking up to $150,000 in damages per infringing work, as well as a permanent injunction to “prevent any recurrence of these harms.” Basbanes is “a renowned authority on the history of books and book culture”. According to CNBC, Gage previously worked at the Times and The Wall Street Journal.
OpenAI is battling a growing list of lawsuits from creatives who accuse it of using their work without permission to train LLMs, including fiction writers George R.R. Martin, John Grisham and Jodi Picoult. At the end of December 2023, The New York Times sued the company and its biggest backer, Microsoft, for using the newspaper’s articles for AI training. An OpenAI representative told us at the time that the two sides were having “productive discussions” and that the lawsuit was unexpected.
